Oracle Blog

Gamification in the Enterprise

Monday Oct 08, 2012

Last week was Oracle OpenWorld, and for those of you not in tech or downtown San Francisco, that might not mean a whole lot. However, if you are familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is our premier customer event. This year, more than 50,000 people attended. It's not a good week to visit San Francisco on vacation because Oracle customers take over all the hotels in town! It was crazy, but a lot of fun and it's a great opportunity for the Apps UX group to do customer research with a range of customers. This year, more than 100+ customers and
partners took the time to team up with our UX experts and provide feedback on
new designs and ideas. Over three days, UX teams conducted 8
one-on-one user feedback sessions, 4 focus groups and 7 surveys. In
addition, we conducted a voice capture activity and were able to collect close
to 70 speech samples at the lab and DEMOgrounds.

This was a great opportunity for us to do some testing on some specific gamification concepts with a set of business analysts. We pulled in 8 folks for a focus group on gamification concepts and whether they thought those would work for their teams.

To get ready for this, my designer extraordinaire, Andrea Cantú, flew into town and we spent almost a week locked in a room together brainstorming design ideas. We killed a few trees trying to get all of our concepts and other examples together in the process, but in the end, we put together a whole series of examples of how you might gamify an Oracle app (in this case, CRM). Andrea is a genius for this kind of thing and the comps she created looked great. Here's a picture of her hard at work!

We also had the good fortune to have my boss, Laurie Pattison and my usability contractor, Shobana Subramanian there to note take and observe as well. Here's a few shots of us, hard at work preparing for the day (or checking out something on Laurie's iPhone...)

To start things off, we gave an overview of gamification and I talked about what it's used for. Then we gave the participants a scenario about our sales person and what we were trying to get her to do. It was a great opportunity to highlight what our business goals might be and why we might want to add game mechanics. It was also a good way to get them thinking about how that might work for them in their environments and workplaces.

There were some surprises for the day. We asked how many of them were already familiar with the concept of gamification--only two people had heard of it and only one was using game mechanics in his work. That's in contrast to a survey we just ran internally with folks in a dev org where almost 50% of about 450 respondents had heard of gamification. As we discussed the ways game mechanics could be used, it became clear that many of the folks had seen some game mechanics in action but didn't know that's what they were. We also noticed that the folks in this group felt that if they were trying to sell the concept in their orgs, they wouldn't call it gamification. That's not a huge surprise to me--they said what we've heard in the past, that gamification does not seem like a serious term for enterprise software. They said they'd sell it with the goals--as a means to increase behaviors by rewarding users for activities. It's a funny problem. The word puts some folks off, but at the same time, I haven't seen another one word description that quite captures the range of things that "gamification" can cover. My guess is that the more mainstream the term becomes, the more desensitized we'll become to the idea the it's trivializing enterprise software in some way. Still, it was interesting to note that this group still felt that they would not take this concept to their bosses or teams and call it "gamification". They focused on the goals, and how we could incentivize desired behaviors with game mechanics. As I have already stated in other posts, I feel like my org is more receptive to discussing how this is just a more transparent type of usability and user experience methods than talking about gamification. That's the argument they said they would use.

All in all, it was a good session. I love getting to talk to customers, present ideas and concepts, and get their feedback and input. It's the type of thing that really helps drive our designs and keeps us grounded in what our customers need/want. We're already planning where to get more feedback opportunities in the coming months.

Wednesday Sep 26, 2012

Things have been a little busy here at GamifyOracle. Last week, I attended a small conference in San Diego on Enterprise Gamification. Mario Herger of SAP, Matt Landes of Google and I were on a panel discussion about how to introduce and advocate gamification in your organization. I gave a talk as well as a workshop on gamification. The workshop was a new concept, to take our Design Jam from Applications User Experience and try it with people outside of user experience. I have to say, the whole thing was a great success, in great part because I had some expert help from Teena Singh from Apps UX. We took a flow from expense reporting and created a scenario about sales reps who are on the road a lot and how we needed them to get their expense reports filed by the end of the fiscal year. We divided the attendees into groups and gave them a little over two hours to work out how they might use game mechanics to gamify the flows.

We even took the opportunity to re-use the app our fab dev team in our Mexico Development Center put together to gamify the event including badges, points, prizes and a leaderboard.

Since I am a firm believer that you can't gamify everything (or at least, not everything well), I focused my talk prior to the workshop on when it works, and when it might not, including pitfalls to gamifying badly. I was impressed that the teams all considered what might go wrong with gamifying expenses and built into their designs some protections against that. I can't wait to take this concept on the road again, it really was a fun day.

Now that we have gotten through that set of events, we're wildly working on our next project for next week. I'm doing a focus group at Oracle OpenWorld on Gamification in the Enterprise. To do that, Andrea Cantu and I are trying to kill as many trees as possible while we work out some gamification concepts to present (see proof below!). It should be a great event and I'm hoping we learn a lot about what our customers think about the use of gamification in their companies and in the products they use.

So that's the news so far from GamifyOracle land. I'll try to get more out about those events and more after next week. And if you will be at OOW, ping me and we can discuss in person! I'd love to know what everyone is thinking in the area.